In the wake of the grim news about the bankrupt auto giants, commentators have been bemoaning the decline of American manufacturing. Please don’t share this sad news with the three crackpot inventors in the gloriously demented new show “Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines,” at Here Arts Center. As the obsessive-compulsive title clearly suggests, these guys are intense, seriously nerdy and highly sensitive fellows. The idea that the world’s last superpower has lost the knack for gizmo making might send them into a colossal funk.

Contraptions and mechanical gewgaws of all sorts are the buzzing, whizzing, clanking lifeblood of this handcrafted theatrical tribute to Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist known for inventing imaginary machines that performed simple tasks with maximum inefficiency. Goldberg would surely delight in the menagerie of complicated devices operated by the postmodern Three Stooges portrayed by the talented actors Quinn Bauriedel, Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford in this playful hour and change of head-spinning silliness. (The machines themselves, and their integration into the funky scrapheap of a set by Hiroshi Iwasaki, are the work of Steven Dufala and Billy Blaise Dufala.)

Consider breakfast. The opening ceremonies of the summer Olympics in Beijing possibly did not demand the tactical strategy, mechanical expertise and human ingenuity that are expended on brewing a pot of coffee, frying an egg and pouring a bowl of cereal for our hungry heroes. The cracking of the egg requires a precisely timed slide down a chute by a stuffed goose astride a wooden block. A plastic bottle of orange juice performs aerial maneuvers that would daunt the Blue Angels.

Labor-saving devices these are not. More often than not some minor flaw in the design or the operation of one of the thingamajigs strung like Christmas ornaments all over the set necessitates an emergency maneuver to save the day, often accompanied by Mr. Sobelle’s lunatic commentary, ripely sauced in a Monty Python accent. By the time a withered sliver of egg and some battered toast made its way from the frying pan to the breakfast table, the meal was looking about as appetizing as a half-sandwich you’d find flattened in the middle of 42nd Street.

Not that this interfered in any way with the savory delight taken in their accomplishment by Phineas, a kilt-wearing gonzo swashbuckler played by Mr. Sobelle; the Chief Commander, a blowhard buffoon played by Mr. Bauriedel; and the techno-nerd Liam played by Mr. Lyford, who speaks only in the crackly code spit out by police radios. (Mr. Sobelle and Mr. Lyford are co-artistic directors of Rainpan 43, the company co-presenting the show, which was also responsible for “All Wear Bowlers,” seen at Here in 2005.)

Without the apparatus of elaborately useless machines that surround them, this oddball trio would have no reason for being. If they did not turn the making of breakfast into a martial campaign to match the best of General Patton, they might be prey to those existential bugaboos that haunt the likes of Gogo and Didi in “Waiting for Godot.”

For the show itself, directed by Aleksandra Wolska, is on the macro as well as micro level something of a Rube Goldberg machine. A tremendous amount of theatrical ingenuity and energy is expended to little expressly dramatic purpose. The plot wouldn’t fill a half-page in a comic book. These unintrepid adventurers prepare for a feared invasion by alien hordes, although the only enemy combatant we actually see is a stuffed cat.

They mourn the loss of their beloved ally, a fellow named Patrick, some of whose appendages have been preserved and continue to offer technical assistance as needed. And in the apocalyptic finale the trio desperately fends off an assault from a fearsome school of trout. (Plastic fish are heaved all over the set.)

But mostly these cutups just goof around, with the actors giving intricately nuanced comic performances that are perfectly in tune with the pinballing madness supplied by the cast of a thousand mechanical supporting players. Mr. Sobelle’s garbled mutterings in cornball British dialects from several centuries are often hilarious. Mr. Bauriedel’s fearless, cluelessly self-confident leader  like William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, only without the towering intellect  is likewise a piquant bit of parody. And the verisimilitude of Mr. Lyford’s impersonation of a police radio (a voice-altering box hanging around his neck comes in handy) and the whizzing robotic sounds he uses to accompany his every movement are funny and fascinating in their precision.

You might squirrel out from under the show’s abiding whimsy a dark commentary on the way that juvenile boys obsessed with silly toys hone their taste for combativeness and grow up to be warmongering fools. But why look for a sermonizing ghost in the machine? The show’s loopy ethos is founded on a celebration of pointlessness, and for most of the running time it is a ticklish pleasure simply to watch these men bicker and pose and play, like kids in a junk-filled garage who’ve consumed too much sugar and haven’t yet discovered the more enervating pleasures of video games.